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The werewolves were the koryos of yore

The London Review of Books has a review of a book between two scholars, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf: A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective. The crux is the case of a 17th-century werewolf:

On​ a spring day in 1691, in what is now the town of Cēsis in Latvia, a group of local men waited to give testimony in a provincial courtroom. The case was unremarkable: a theft from the local church. One by one the men were called up by the judges, who were wealthy members of the German-speaking elite. When an old man called Mātiss took the stand, the judges noticed that the local innkeeper, who had already been questioned, was smiling. Asked why, he replied that he was amused to see ‘Old Thiess’, his neighbour and tenant, swearing on the Bible, since ‘everyone knows he goes around with the Devil and was a werewolf.’

That he was a werewolf seems to have been common knowledge and Thiess himself freely admitted it – in fact, he said, it wasn’t even the first time it had been mentioned in court. Ten years earlier, he had been questioned about his broken nose and had explained to the court that a neighbour had struck him with a broomstick while they were both in Hell. The judges then had laughed and let him go. But in Cēsis, the court changed tack from the church theft and embarked on an interrogation of the werewolf.

The review discusses the contrasting views of the authors, Carlo Ginzburg, who argues that belief in werewolves is evidence of a pan-European pagan substratum that persisted down to early modernity, and Bruce Lincoln, who suggests that these individuals are “persons of a subaltern group, accused by a powerful court,” and they by asserting their werewolf status they are “affirming their own dignity and benevolence.”

Ginzburg represents an old-fashioned view that magic and non-Christian traditions represent folk paganism, while Lincoln seems to make recourse to more modern ideas relating to structural relations of class and ethnicity. The elite of Livonia at the time was German-speaking, while the peasants were invariably Estonian or Latvian (as we’d call them today).

On Twitter, Francis Young, who is a scholar of Lithuanian paganism, argues that it is likely that the idea of shape-shifters comes from the Estonians (Thiess seems to have been a Latvian). He says there are no traditions of werewolves in his study of native Baltic (Lithuanian and Latvian) paganism. This matters obviously in light of Ginzburg’s assertion of a pan-European pagan tradition that likely goes back to the early Indo-Europeans. If it was a local borrowing from Finnic people, then Ginzburg is wrong in the proximate sense.

I have a slightly different take. In Tracing the Indo-Europeans Dorcas Brown and David Anthony have a chapter where they document a ritual sacrifice of 50 dogs and half a dozen wolves by the Srubna people nearly 4,000 years ago. This was probably an initiation of a koryos, an Indo-European “Mannerbund” (though these would be adolescents). The koryos are commonly depicted as wolves or dogs in Indo-European folklore and are described as such in sources as diverse as the Vedas and the custom of the Greek ephebeiaYoung is surely correct about Baltic pagans, this is after all his specialty. But, I would note that werewolves have an ancient Indo-European basis, and the Finnic people were influenced by Indo-Europeans, in particular Balto-Slavs and Indo-Iranians. The Finnish sky-god Ukko is clearly Baltic Perkunas and Vedic Varuna. Though it is unparsimonious, the idea of werewolves among the Latvians might have come proximately from the Estonians, but ultimately from the Indo-European substrate!

In sum, I think in the details Ginzburg is likely incorrect, but broadly I do think there is something to the idea that a skein of Indo-European folklore did persist submerged under the Christian beliefs of Europe at the time. Lincoln’s modernist assertions are fashionable, and likely most of the readers of The London Review of Books will assume he is closer to the mark, but they have the unfortunate characteristic of almost certainly being totally wrong.

8 thoughts on “The werewolves were the koryos of yore

  1. Cēsis (Wenden) area was mostly ethnic Livonian (not Estonian although the Livonian language is distantly related to Estonian, albeit influenced by the otherwise unrelated Baltic languages in such noteworthy features as pitch accent). The language has been nearly extinct for a long time, and its last native speakers died out earlier in XXI c.

  2. It’s really difficult to know what mythology existed among peoples long writing. I have confidence that we could reconstruct that among pIE but less confidence that the idea of skinchangers didn’t spread wider than pIE already at this time, that it didn’t perhaps go extinct and get reintroduced etc. Can we say really what transformative beliefs shamanic Siberian peoples had at 4000 BCE already, for example?

    Reading the episode itself, I found it amazing; surely Old Thiess had quite strong false memories, false identities and in a sense these were constructed by himself and his community…

  3. @Harry, I guess yeah, that’s the kind of thing I would tend to find more plausible

    I suppose a thing for me here is that you’ve got the ideas that the article sort of presents as in contention, but these ideas are all around the idea seem to be that there is some sort of social institution of “good werewolves” that’s wider than Old Thiess. In one sense it’s either seen as a pagan survival (and Razib’s version links this to the primeval koryos) or it’s a new “social construct” developed whole-cloth out of medieval class relations (where individuals theatrically transform themselves into predatory animals to prey on the aristocrats who prey on them). But both of these ideas are around the idea that there is a social institution out there.

    But I guess to me it seems more plausible that the social position by the Middle Ages is mostly just going to be that werewolves are evil and devilish, but what happened here is that Old Thiess, who probably has some mental health issues or else is a crafty old bugger who grifts on his neighbours with fake “charms” (and possibly a little of both), has accepted his community’s position that he is a werewolf and then, in complete isolation, invented some delusion and/or rationale where this “Good and totally Christian, actually”, rather than contest the allegation. (“You’re right of course, but…”, “Anti-werewolves are the real werewolves, actually..”).

  4. That sort of social legitimation game goes on everywhere and everywhen of course. Was the ‘koryos’ originally a kind of useful institution that benefitted early IE societies, or was it actually a harmful sort of Bronze Age Bullingdon Club bastardry, perpetrated by relative elites, and at the expense of resources that could be channelled into socially useful growth (which IE expansions succeeded ‘despite’, far from ‘because’)?

    We continue these sort of arguments today; is the military the beneficial “Defense” or the harmful and wicked “Military-Industrial Complex” and “Empire”? Looking over the long term, one new thing is that today we have new arguments about these derived from evolutionary theory. Is it adaptive and fit in a situation of inter-social competition? &c.

  5. @Matt

    I propose a simpler solution. Academics(especially in social science) being what they are keep specializing in increasingly obscure topics. They need to keep publishing books and papers to stay relevant. And as Mr. Ginzburg and Mr. Lincoln here needed to publish a book, they latched on to an obscure court document and made the freaking Mount Everest out of this molehill.

  6. Shape shifters, including what we would call werewolves, are definitely part of some pre-Columbian North American mythologies, especially those of the Na-Dene people whose roots immediately before arriving in North America are in Siberia ca. 3000 BCE to 2500 BCE. The notion of it as an areal Siberian tradition that also includes Uralic languages rings pretty true.

    Indo-European was manifestly polytheistic, a religious ethos that echos a chiefdom with the chief’s key advisors deified, while werewolves seem like more of an animist tradition (Japanese nine tailed foxes also have a similar feel as does a lot of Japanese mythology) usually associated with myths that have a formative era at an earlier level of societal organization like a hunter-gatherer band.

    In contrast, Santorini in Greece, going back to pre-Christian times and firmly in the Indo-European tradition, but carried over into the Christian era, was known for its vampires and vampire killers, not its werewolves, and there is really nothing werewolfish in Greek and Roman mythology. To the extent it does have a broad European tradition, I’d look to a pre-IE substrate rather than to a proto-IE source. (FWIW, there werewolves are also absent in the Abrahamic religious tradition which pretty much dates to the Iron Age with Sumerian and Egyptian remote source material.)

    The connection of the koryos to wolves or dogs is more metaphorical, indeed, a metaphor alive to this day in the sense of the “dogs of war” or references to elite royal/Presidential guards or loyalist aristocrats or followers as “lapdogs”. I don’t think that the mythic depictions in this sense was meant to evoke literal shapeshifters.

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